Regardless of when your next performance review happens, let’s talk about things you can do now to make writing your self-evaluation easier – and then how to use this gathered information to make your self-eval more effective.
This episode is based off of this article if you also want to see it written out.
A full transcript will appear here within two weeks of the episode being published.
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Full Transcript
Ep 79. Self-Evaluations Performance Reviews
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! All right, so today we are going to talk about performance reviews, which I know may sound dull, and it kind of is. But hopefully we can make it more just easier on you going forward in a way that will help it be less painful. And then also even if yours are a couple months away, I just encourage you to listen to this because we’re gonna talk about some things you could start doing now, just chipping away at, that will make those performance reviews a lot easier.
So what I want to do is talk about the pre-work, the type of stuff that you can do to help future you write that performance review a whole lot easier. Then I want to talk about how to use this information to write a great performance review. Now, I’m not an expert at this, but I was really lucky and had a kind of younger mentor when I was practicing law who walked me through how to write a good performance review. So I’m sharing her advice because it served me really well, and then I want to talk about other ripple effects about doing that pre-work even if you’re in an industry where you don’t have to write your own performance reviews and self-evaluations. The ripple effects of doing the pre-work-type stuff even if you don’t have to ultimately use it for that kind of stuff can really be valuable as well. So let’s dig into that!
Now, in terms of the pre-work, the stuff that we could do before actually writing the performance review, I’m probably not blowing your mind by talking about how we could track your wins over the year. A lot of people have this in mind and do something similar already, and so, let’s talk about it a little bit more in case you kind of know this but don’t implement it yet or want to brush up on it or used to do it but forgot, which I’ve done. I’m like, “Why did I stop doing that? That was great.” So let’s talk about that first step so that we’re all on the same page. I would love to help you set up a more pain-free win tracking system and make sure that it sticks throughout the year and that you don’t lose track of it or sight of it.
Create a Document/Email Folder to Track Wins – 2:16
So the first strategy is to create an email folder and a document to track your wins. If you don’t already have one, just create an email folder titled “wins” or “nice emails” or however you would think of good feedback and win-type emails. As people email you your nice feedback and you get good news showing how amazing you are at your job, drop those emails into your “wins” or “nice emails” folder so that you keep track of them. So for example, if you’re an attorney and you get even just a court notice that you want to motion, throw it in there. If you’re in corporate and you get an email from a client signing off after your awesome presentation, put that in there too.
In addition, not all good news comes in the form of emails, so create a document that only you see or even just a phone note in your Notes app titled something similar, you know, “wins,” “nice emails.” It’s helpful for it to be the same title as your email folder so you know how to search for it if you lose track of it. When similar types of wins or feedback come in through non-email channels, just write a quick note, something like, “On February 3rd of 2024, Laura the boss told me ABC client loved XYZ part of the presentation, which was my contribution. As a result, they agreed to a larger scope of work.” So you’re just keeping track of these things right now as time goes on.
Now, here’s the critical next step of this strategy because my guess is you have probably started something like this in the past and maybe you’re continuing on with it, which is awesome. But for many people, including past me, you set this all up and then you just forget about it. You don’t add to it. You don’t put emails there. You just kind of forget about it, and then the performance review time rolls around and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I was gonna do that thing and I didn’t.”
Use Your Calendar for Reminders – 3:56
Okay, so here’s the trick. Use your calendar to help remind you to do these types of things. And so, for example, what you could do as part of your weekly planning session, which is in your calendar and then you have the agenda written out. You could have a line item in there that just says something like “update wins or nice email folder and document.” Link to any documents that you can, but you don’t have to if that’s not relevant. And that will help you, at a cadence that works for you, remember, “Oh, yeah. Let me go through my emails and think about any wins this week. Let me put them in that folder,” or “Let me just jot them down in the document,” and that way each week you’re tracking them.
If a weekly task isn’t gonna work for you, like you know you’re gonna blow right through it, which I definitely have experience in doing, you just might want to consider making it more rare. It doesn’t mean don’t do it but making it rare might be the right solution for you to make it actually happen. So in those scenarios, like in this context or other contexts of things that I blow through more often, I just think, “Let me make this rare, and how frequently but less frequently could I do this and still be effective?”
So what you could do instead of this, instead of that weekly task, is protect more like 30 minutes once a month to update that folder and those documents. Sometimes we’re just more successful at protecting time for and then following through on that rare stuff more than the two frequent things that we’re like, “Well, it’ll happen next week. I’ll do it then.” And then you do that every single week.
This sounds simple and it is, but really, it can have such an impact on actually bringing the plans that you are creating to life and actually helping you live out and execute on them in the ways that you wanted to. I will also note that one thing I love about it is not only that it helps me do it, but it also helps release the pressure the rest of the time from feeling like I need to be doing it so that I’m not driving or laying in bed at night being like, “Ugh, I haven’t done that thing like I thought I would.” It’s like, “Nope, my calendar tells me when to do it. I don’t need to think about it right now.”
Self-Evaluation/Performance Review Strategies My Mentor Taught Me – 5:54
All right, turning to how to use this information to write a great performance review, I want to share about the strategies that this older associate taught me when I was a young, young associate at my first firm.
A couple points are, first of all, when you write your self-eval or performance review of yourself, whatever you want to call it, really absorb that no one at work knows what you are or have been up to this past year. Pretty much everyone is just immersed in their own lives, their own work, and even the people assigning you the work forget about it.
When they are considering you for a performance review, a promotion, a raise, all that kind of stuff, they likely have a general idea of how they feel about you but they do not recall the specifics. I mean, you probably have a harder time recalling the specifics than you’d like. They definitely will when it comes to your work. So help them out. The more specific you can get, the more convincing you are. Help them understand and build that business case for your promotion and/or your raise by being reminded of how incredibly valuable you are to that company, firm, practice, organization, whatever you’re part of.
So with that goal in mind of how to be as specific as possible, this older, more experienced colleague of mine encouraged me to basically aim to answer the questions in a self-eval form with a succinct statement and then give three bullet-point examples for everything. So I’m gonna give an example. This is an actual example that I pulled up from my old attorney days of a self-eval, and this is adapted of a question of, “What do you think your strengths are?”
Obviously, I have anonymized it so that nothing — it’s not that interesting on that front. But hopefully it gives you a good example of what you could do for answering a question and more so also see how the consistent chipping away of work at gathering the specifics will help you do this element of it in a less painful way when it comes time for the self-eval.
So here’s the quote. Again, remember the question is, “What are your strengths?”
“I enjoy crafting arguments based on law and fact to help resolve clients’ disputes and believe my ability to do so improved during this review period. The following instances are examples of how I was able to use legal analysis and writing skills to benefit clients:
- During DEF case with Jane and Joe partners, my legal research helped us draft a consent judgment as part of a settlement that we then used to terminate a pending patent office reexamination of our client’s patent. This allowed our client to exit both proceedings with a patent intact and in addition to resolve its dispute with ACME company on favorable terms.
- In SRT matter with Jamala and Jim partners, I drafted an opposition to a preliminary injunction with Alice associate that helped limit the scope of the preliminary injunction that ultimately issued such that our client’s ability to operate commercially was not unduly hammered.
- For the LMNOP case with Paul partner, I drafted letters of protest against three applied for trademarks that would have caused a likelihood of confusion with our client’s marks. The letters were eventually accepted and led to resolution of the dispute in a manner that was favorable to our client.”
Hopefully this gives you just some little example of succinct statement, example, example, example and how that example, example, example really drives home the succinct statement. I think often we kind of aim for the succinct statement but don’t bring in that specificity. At least that’s what I used to do. You can just see how by giving examples it just seems a lot more supported and credible to share. It also reminds all of those partners who are on that associate committee or in the general conversation of the impact that you had in a way that they probably forgot. Also, if those people on the review committee want to go talk to partners, they’re easily identified in this thing. Now, I know I’m using partner and firm language here, but you can extrapolate into your position.
In addition, circling back to that pre-work, those were all things that I would have saved in an email folder or a document to really make it much easier to go through and figure out how to do this, how to bring the specificity into the review. One last shout out to that awesome associate who taught me this. This is not something I came up with, but I am so, so grateful that she taught it to me, and hopefully just sharing with someone out there who will find some use and utility in it as well.
The Importance of Tracking Wins – 10:16
All right, now for the other ripple effects that this can cause. Even if you don’t have to write a self-evaluation or a performance review or something like that, I still think tracking the wins in the ways that we talked about in the pre-work is so, so valuable. There are kind of two main reasons for this that are related. First is we could all use the occasional reminder of how awesome we are at our jobs. When work gets hard and you struggle, you’ll have this email folder and document to go to to remind yourself why you are amazing. I think that, understandably and I think unavoidably, we all struggle sometimes with just feeling bad about something that happened at work, and then it can spiral into maybe even, “I’m terrible at this job,” or all sorts of things like that. And having some sort of folder and document that reminds you, “No, you are actually really good at certain parts of this job. This is just a tough break, and we all have them,” really, really helps with getting through that.
Now, I just want to throw out there that I know that we should all have internal confidence and not rely on those external kudos to feel good about ourselves. But I’m also a realist, and I think that sometimes external praise can really help us in those tough times when those internal voices aren’t showing up in the ways that we want to and we’re spiraling a bit. So this one’s huge. Whether or not you need it for a self-evaluation, tracking those wins can really help you with your, I guess, resilience. I don’t know. I’m not sure I really like that word but your ability to play through those harder moments.
And that brings me to the second point, which is related. When we have confidence in our value, at work and outside of it, we feel more confident drawing boundaries to make our workload manageable, which as you know, a lot of what I talk about comes back to that. When we have confidence at work, in who we are, the value that we bring to the table, what we show up for, how we deliver for our clients, our company, our organization, our entity, all of that, we are more likely to draw and maintain boundaries to help us protect our time, our energy, and our lives outside of work.
This win-tracking approach that we’ve talked about will help you gain that confidence and remind you of your value to the company even in those tougher times, and that is therefore empowering you to stand up for yourself.
All right? So I encourage you, if you can’t do it right now — if you’re driving around, use Siri to remind you to do this later. But what I would love to see you do is just calendar even, I don’t know, 15/20 minutes of time to set up the document or the phone note if you haven’t already, and then calendar the time just to start. You can always experiment and change it from there. But calendar the time of when you’re gonna update those things, and then see what happens!
Let me know how it goes. Good luck with this. I will also include an article that this podcast is based off of if you want to see it written, if you’re someone like me who I like listening to things, but I want the written kind of takeaways. So there will be an article in the show notes that is the blog post that inspired this episode so that you can go back to it even if you just want to see that kind of self-evaluation example in writing.
Join The Bright Method Program – 13:27
And just a reminder, my January through March program is open for enrollment right now! At the time of this recording in mid-, to late-November, it is over halfway full. I believe there are 30 people out of the 50 spots that are available. So hopefully there are some left. If you want to jump in, you can go to www.kellynolan.com/bright and let me know if you have any questions!
Regardless of whether you jump in or not, thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
